Achayot
by born30
Summary: Their mother, raised on the myths of the Ancient Jews, clung steadfastly to one vision in particular, divined before her marriage, that prophesied her bearing two girls, daughters, achayot. AU; Ziva-centric; Tali alive; established Tiva.
1. Part I

_Disclaimer: NCIS doesn't know how to respect these characters anyway.  
Gratitude: I would never have written this story without the love, encouragement, and support of my dear friend & writing partner, Allison (mon-petit-pois). _

_Alright folks, here we go again…_

* * *

 _Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you.  
Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay._  
Ruth 1:16

 **Prelude**

 _When they ran the days away through the fields of orange trees and giggled in their shared bed at night until fatigue claimed them to the galaxy of dreams, their mother wove tales of their origin, swearing with no guile or exaggeration to the line of woman from whom they descended—and to their ability for intuition. Divinity. Visions._

 _The elder daughter, formed of the logical, modern world and her father's rough, guiding hand, scoffed at the notion of foresight, at the preposterous thought of knowing things yet to pass. The younger daughter was still taken by fairy tales._

 _Their mother, raised on the myths of the Ancient Jews, clung steadfastly to one vision in particular, divined before her marriage, that_ _prophesied_ _her bearing two girls, a hand-and-one apart; daughters for a future husband who would desire sons. The vision, she claimed, that showed the two becoming responsible for each other when everything else fell away._

 _They would be achayot. Sisters._

 **Part I**

The doctors said the nightmares would go away.

But night after middle-of-the-night, she startled out of the vivid, phantom fears of Somalia and into the blackness of their bedroom, miles and months away from the epicenter of pain; she shivered from the cold perspiration on her skin, her heart thumping from subconscious exertion, slimy bile climbing the walls of her throat. It never did matter how hard she fought them off…

The doctors also said she would be able to carry a baby, afterwards. Lies were easy.

Ziva David was accustomed to disappointment. She was through asking God why she was given _this_ lot. Why she was chosen to be a daughter who buried her mother and disobeyed her father; a sister who couldn't save her half-brother and left her youngest sibling behind; an agent who got captured. A woman who could not escape thieving hands and groping tongues.

And so it was. Nightmare. Startle. Cold flesh. Skittering pulse—

His arms reaching for her.

 _H-how did you find me?_

The sheets she bought new just a week earlier bunched as the strong arm around her waist drew her rigid body close against him; he was warmth and a nose nuzzling her neck, lips pressing behind her ear. She knew him, his touch and scent, and did not mistake him. Tony DiNozzo was as predictable as the nighttime terrors themselves.

"It's okay, babe," he slurred, like always. "Just a dream."

Normally, that would be enough to soothe her—perhaps not enough to deliver her to sleep again, but his steady heartbeat and steady snores and steady presence grounded her, gave her the illusion of steadiness for herself. She could make it to morning on the intervals of his exhales, waves over her collarbone and down under her sleep shirt, the heat of his life a bonfire from which she derived hope. That she was _here_. That she came back. Alive.

On that night, though, she recognized that neither memory nor distortion had woken her; even if the effects were the same, the usual cure was useless.

Everything was different now.

Ziva lifted his arm off her waist like a harness on an amusement park ride. From this, he did not need to keep her safe.

"I have to go," she whispered in response to his sleepy whine of confusion.

"Hm? Case?"

Her eyes, adjusted to the dark, flicked to the pair of cell phones on the nightstand. It had been over a year since anything as mundane as a call to a gruesome one a.m. crime scene had disrupted her sleeping patterns. A twinge in her chest told her maybe she longed for the past; its immediate recession, that maybe it was misplaced. Beyond their bedroom, there were textbooks splayed out beside her laptop on the dining room table and one gun in the locked safe on the mantle.

" _I_ have to go," she repeated, her legs adopting gooseflesh in the cool air out from beneath the covers. Away from him. "You will stay."

The mattress dipped and she sensed him propping up on an elbow without looking behind her for confirmation. "Where you going?"

"She needs me," Ziva stated quietly, offering no explanation for how that was so evident to her at the unreasonable hour and without any discernible—logical—summoning to the effect.

But Tony had seen both sides. He understood, perhaps even better than she herself, for it wasn't a guess he voiced along the curl of her back.

"Your sister."

/ / ~ / / ~ / /

Across the bedroom, Ziva padded softly on feet that still reverted to tip-toeing around her father's anger and sidestepping ugly truths as often as roadside bombs: the stealth of her first lifetime. She dressed and tied her hair back and washed her face in the sink of the en suite—all amidst grey shadows. It was not just her feet that slipped unthinkingly into the soles of old habits.

Her efforts were in vain.

She was stuffing an overnight bag when Tony tossed over with a sigh and switched on the bedside lamp, sunset glow washing away the dark. He cringed against the light, a big paw scrubbing at closed eyelids.

"Why don't you just stay over there? It'd be easier than this back and forth every—"

"You know," Ziva countered, tugging at the bag's zipper, a sliver of her thumb catching in the metal teeth. _Ow._ "She wants to do this herself."

Flipping the covers off, he leaned out of bed and grumbled, "You David woman…so stubborn."

A smirk coiled the edges of her mouth, but it was only for his benefit; as soon as he'd stumbled into the en suite to hit the head, a frown settled. The accusation echoed a spring evening in Tel Aviv one year earlier; it echoed her sister's confused tones…

" _I do not understand why you are being so stubborn." Tali David sat by an opened window, through which the last vestiges of the day's light dripped over the watery horizon. "Perhaps you are grieving Michael, not thinking clearly—"_

" _No. It is not that." Ziva felt honey eyes track her around the cramped bedroom. She fought ratcheting unease with constant movement, but a whirlpool stirred inside of her still, as it had since leaving the tarmac that morning. Since she sent_ them _away. There was little to pack from her modest Tel Aviv apartment on the shoreline, a false promise over the past four years—that she would return to it, to the life she once led around its minimalist walls._

" _One short?" she'd heard Tony bellow from within the belly of the roaring Guppy._

 _Gibbs, as the hatch lifted: "What she wanted, DiNozzo."_

 _Stubborn. She wanted to scoff. To scream and growl, teeth bared to the heavens. Yes, she was being stubborn. He'd made her that way. Stubborn and unbreakable, his warrior daughter._

 _To her sister, she confessed nothing. "There are things I cannot tell you, Tali."_

" _You and Abba always say that when it involves Mossad."_

 _Pausing in her bustle, Ziva looked to Tali—raven locks spouting from a widow's peak they shared; plump, vivacious features, a lithe body of curves never once used for deception; a natural performer stepping into professional waters. Ziva's mind flooded with the photographs she received par avion in D.C.: Tali as Isolde, Tali as Princess Turandot, Tali as Violetta. Photos all lost in the explosion that destroyed another of her apartments, one in a series of events that catapulted her onto this inevitable path._

 _But Tali was free. Unburdened._

 _Ziva did not want that changed._

" _Then I do not have to explain why it must be this way," she furthered, though reason failed to abate the sense of déjà vu. She was leaving her little sister behind, again—as she'd done when shame over Ari first sent her fleeing to NCIS. At the time, Tali had displayed her displeasure with a fit of rage worthy of any grand stage._

" _America is not your home!" Words like lighting, her true pain had thundered unspoken in their wake: 'You are my home. Do not leave me.'_

 _Now Ziva's supposed Aliyah, too, was double-edged, and brief. "I do not expect you to understand. I ask only that you can…forgive me one more time?"_

 _Unfolding thin arms from across her body, Tali's frown melted to gaping bewilderment. "Forgive you for what, Zivvie? Doing your duty? It is Abba who is sending you away—and so soon after you have been returned to me." A few years of maturity had gifted her grace, it seemed._

 _Ziva hesitated; how could she explain loyalty? displacement? betrayal? "For not visiting you more often."_

 _Was it a lie if it answered another question truthfully?_

 _A dove, Tali cooed and fluttered over the carpet, pulling Ziva to sit with her on the hard mattress. Their shoulders bumped, as did their hips, and it might have been a summer's night in their old house as they climbed into bed for secret whispers and mingled dreams. Her head rested on Ziva's shoulder._

" _When you return from this oh-so-important mission, we will go to the beach for days, yes? Just you and me."_

 _The breeze through the window tasted of the Mediterranean, of salt and sand, of olive oil and the pomegranate perfume their mother wore for the duration of their childhood, but there were beaches, and opera houses, and apartments in America, as well._

 _Her pack was…packed, sitting like a slumped homeless man at her feet. There was nothing left to do but wait till morning with her sister. She placed a hand over Tali's slender fingers while the whirlpool swirled, raged; into the briny silence, she offered up an answer to another hidden question._

" _Yes, when I come back to you, my dearest achot…things will be different."_

/ / ~ / / ~ / /

"Ziv?"

For the second time that night, she startled, not having expected him to follow her down from their bedroom to the foyer of their townhouse. She stomped her left foot against the tile, propelling her heel snuggly into the running shoe.

"I really must get to her…"

Tony swiped up the overnight bag from the floor and hooked it onto her elbow. "I won't wait up."

Ziva regarded him standing tall before her, bare-chested and unexpectedly imposing; the same body that proved salvation after the ghosts of Somalia chased her out of nightmares on a nightly basis; the same arms reaching for her, arms from which she'd flinched…and then fell into, allowing them to pull her out of a cell of desert torture. A cell of consequence—for the choice she made while in the circle of her sister's arms on a spring evening in Tel Aviv. Or rather, the choice she did not make.

Somehow, in all the fallout, she never lost Tony.

Mossy green orbs cast their line, hooking her in, towing, towing… "Come back home, 'kay?"

She was needed elsewhere, but granted herself a touch, an open palm gliding up his furry chest. _Dohv_ , she called him with affection. Bear. _Her_ bear. In her windbreaker, she shivered at the fire of his skin, still heated from slumber.

His eyelids drooped, dozing on his feet.

One fingertip tapped the notch at the base of his throat, a substitute kiss. "Go back to sleep, my love."

A nod. Shuffling feet. "Say hi to Tali for me."

"I will."

"And your squishy new niece, too," he mumbled over his shoulder, a fond smile rising and fading.

Sharing in his gentle gesture, Ziva gripped the knob on the front door, twisting. "I will," she said again, and took flight into the crisp night air.

They needed her.


	2. Part II

_Note: Thank you all. :)  
Warning: Adult themes. Read carefully._

* * *

 **Part II**

Ziva drove fast, faster, currents of chilled air tumbling into the car over the lip of the lowered window. Above the whipping wind, the streets whispered their names in the dark, elevating familiar maps in her brain. Shortcuts, like a young child, tugged on her sleeve, requesting her attention; every turn, every stoplight observed her haste. Stagnancy was the enemy of the night, and early morning traffic was hours away.

Tony didn't like Tali living so far away from them, especially now. Gibbs had once made the same complaint of Ziva's former residence. _It is the community_ , she tried to explain, then and still. Silver Spring carried the essence of home, of Israel. A place they could not return.

A red light, the first of its kind. Left foot on the brake, Ziva tapped the gas with her right, the engine's roar vaulting through the empty streets, masking the recurring rattle in her chest, a guilty percussion. It was her mission to Somalia that set everything in motion…

 _She never meant to be captured. Not alive. A dead body they never would have beaten, neglected, defiled._

 _Right away Saleem and his men sensed the fight in her—a small, resilient flame. They detected the stench of dignity wafting off her skin. They saw freedom flicker yellow from between the cracks of swollen-shut eyelids. She was not a kamikaze, sent into their camp in the name of something bigger than herself, a motivation they would have identified; she was not there to kill and die._

 _She had_ too much _to live for, her cheeks too plump, her hips too round, and that was more dangerous than any tailspin of destruction._

 _They sought to quell the fire of her, their prisoner, before she consumed them all._

 _First, they broke her body. It would have been her first choice as well._

 _Then, they sought to weave her screams into revelations, hoping to unspool the thread of her knowledge. She anticipated, speaking in Old Hebrew—hymns and prayers from her mother's lips, if she spoke at all. She became mute, shielding their secrets: Mossad's, NCIS', her father's._

 _It was not loyalty that pressed her mouth shut though the glut of fists and rushing water, through the shiver of cool instruments plunging into flesh, scraping bone, yanking at teeth. In the early days, she told herself it mattered, that what they wanted from her would be her escape plan, her flight of weary feet, her salvation._

 _But she knew better. Knew of breaking the stubborn, the mute, the ones who had something to live for. You went after what kept them alive._

 _And eliminated it._

/ / ~ / / ~ / /

Through the city and the urban sprawl to the four-story apartment building in Kemp Mill. Her feet then took up the journey inside; muffled cries echoed down the stairwell into the lobby, luring her with urgency to her destination. Bothering not with knocking but instead using her copy of the key, she entered her sister's second-floor residence and the mournful sound intensified. The origin of need.

The sole source of light was the dull bulb over the stove. A thousand-mile stare scanned, scanned leveled shadows, a city at midnight; the simple layout, simple furnishings blurred on the edges of the visible.

"Tali?" she called out between the clarion wails of her _akhyanit_. "Tali, it is me. _Tali?_ "

The only response was young lungs heaving, heaving: _Who's there?_

Ziva's pulse hitched, but she refused to believe her sister a modern day Jochebed, abandoning her baby down the Nile. In the six weeks since the birth, she'd found Tali bouncing the sobbing babe in her arms, walking up and down the length of the apartment, helpless. She'd found her locked in the bathroom, hiding from the infant's endless wants and needs.

But she'd never found her missing.

It would have been a studio apartment if not for the bedroom beyond the lone wall of kitchen, the only space out of direct view. They were too old for games of hide-and-seek in the orange groves. _I give up! Time to come out, Talia!_

She stripped the windbreaker, one sleeve turning inside out; it and the overnight bag were deposited on the dinette table as she moved swiftly, her stride male and fearless down the concise stretch of hallway to—

A door left ajar.

Another red light, blinking monotonously behind her eyes. Her breathing thinned; her feet melted into the carpet of her sister's apartment, the same way her calves, thighs, and back had fused with the wooden chair by the night they first came for her…

 _She thought it was a mistake, an oversight amidst a guard change after sunset because she couldn't remember the last time she'd run, walked across her lonely cell, stood up on her own. Time was like anything else now, expendable. They always kept her bound._

 _When she clawed through the rope binds, they tore her fingernails off with pliers. All ten were lost for a single lesson. When she tipped over the chair, they left her on her side for days, until she could no longer feel the arm crushed beneath her own dwindling weight. Everything was expendable, most of all their prisoner._

 _But they had never left the door to her cell open before._

 _Opportunity unlocked the dams, flooding saliva into her parched mouth. I am coming back to you, Tali… Her bloody, scarred stubs for fingers gnawed like rodent teeth at the ropes tethering her to the skinny armrests. It will be different… Smoke wafted up from her ankles chafing against the binds, the wood kindling her flame anew. I am coming to you…_

 _Then the hinges creaked, widening the mistake—and it struck her, the cruel duality a fisted blow deflating her hopes. Her body stilled, bracing._

 _An open door let one out as easily as it let others in._

/ / ~ / / ~ / /

Ziva followed the cries, pushing aside the object of fear—a catalyst for her nightmares—and slipped into the deeper dark of the bedroom. Her relief was real, even if the possibility of her desert cell on the other side was not.

That didn't mean it wasn't someone else's prison.

 _H-how did you find me?_

"Tali," she sighed, cautious in her discovery.

That which was her sister in apricot flesh and raven mane stood in front of the crib in the corner, clutching with an ashen grip to the railing; her thin frame, draped with a gauzy summer nightgown, arched in permanent feline stretch; arched away from the barred contraption as if chained to it, to the room, to her child.

 _I will call her Natana, my gift from God._

Young lungs heaving, heaving: _Who's there?_

Ziva rocked forward, heel to toe to the end of the crib, and peered in at the mass of exertion and agony, all red and pulpy, the shape of a lima bean on its side atop the white bedding. Tortured wails shot from the wreckage of its gaping mouth, a hot pit of long unanswered pleas. She ached to console her blood.

"Tali," she repeated, firmer, admonishing. "Have you not heard me calling for you? Surely you have heard _Natana_ at the very least."

Even if she had, it did not matter, for despite her name spoken close by, the new presence at her side, and her screaming child, Tali was immobile but for her lips, parting slightly—

"I did not ask you to come." A voice once so pure as to make their _Abba_ and audiences in opera houses from Tel Aviv and D.C. weep now rasped out the notes of an alto.

"Because you are handling this so well on your own?"

Tony was right—stubborn.

Caving to her instincts, Ziva reached over the railing and laid her palm on the squirming infant's bare chest, the inflamed skin tacky film on cooled tomato soup. Her tongue clucked sympathy, and the torrent of distress caught in the small, hoarse throat, tapering.

"That is better, _Tanaleh_ ," she praised gently, her thumb soothing along a tiny set of ribs.

"She stops crying for you." Tali stared dreamily at the baby's calmed features. "Never for me…"

A pinch at her side, the same sensation received from running too long: a warning. "Let me help you," the worried sister and aunt urged. "Both of you. I can stay here until you have—"

"No, no…"

"But I can _help_."

"NO!"

Tali's flat hand collided, _smack_ , with the crib railing and Natana jumped, a fresh sob unfurling from the tunnels of her throat into the dense air of the bedroom. The act of violence was trigger, and the rest of the young mother's statue came apart then, a delayed implosion, pulses of blue life flowing to the tips of previously frozen limbs, animating.

Ziva thought of the radius of obliteration: her training to calculate collateral damage and death. An equation of morbid cause and effect. If a low-grade bomb detonated in a crowded village square; if a sniper's bullet drove into the temple, instead of the heart; if a woman was left alone in the desert…

… _surely her body belonged to the vultures._

 _Through the door open ajar, they came in a pair. One to rip the clasp on her pants and take her dry and thrashing; the other, to palm her screams from behind, to burrow beneath her dignity, a sweaty, dirty vice on her breast squeezing, squeezing like the machine in her doctor's office, searching out lumps, disease._

 _They kept her bound during and she convinced herself it was because they feared her. Men chained up lions, bears—any wild thing that could tear them apart. Spurred, she fought her binds as fiercely as her attackers; she mauled the hand that silenced her and spit what saliva she had into the bearded demon riding her; she roared in her torment, burning through herself before they could extinguish her light._

 _But they cared not that she was less woman than beast, or even less human; she detached, spirit rising out of her shell, out of their reach, so as to watch the carnage as an observer. To watch as they pecked, bit, tore; forced the taste of gasoline down her body's throat and reached—low—inside of her, clawing and slitting tender flesh, setting fertile fields ablaze. Rending land that was not theirs uninhabitable._

 _And when they were through pillaging, they gave her back a ravaged husk of clotted blood and overlapping bruises; but out from under their oppressive weight, she filled herself again, animating a corpse and raging on in the tongues of her ancestors, reveling in the hurried, stumbling, frightened escape of her destroyers out through the door they came. Her heart thumped fast and erratic within her, pumping silvery spite through her veins._

 _They would fear her, fear her, fear her._

 _It was hours before her war cries melted to little girl tears; before her shouts for revenge dissolved into pleas for her dead mother; before she formulated the fatalities of survival._

/ / ~ / / ~ / /

Ziva surfaced gagging, iron awash over her tongue. Chaos of limbs flew around her, plowing into her stomach, her chest. Screams were the world, and she fumbled—a broken Atlas—beneath the burden. The floor rushed up, collecting.

Tali collapsed after her, a pile of bones and suffering and frustration emptying into her elder sister's lap. Shock at the fall stole her fight; sobs replaced her words, the cadence and fluctuation of grief.

If a mother cannot care for her child…

All faces out of her sight, Natana bellowed scared and shrill in her own language: _Who's there?_

In her wingspan, Ziva enfolded Tali, shielding her to her breast, a mother consoling her child. She rocked them, their bodies a metronome marking time until the terrors fled.

"It is okay now. I am here," she heard herself whisper, even as she prayed for Tony, for his arms to be the biggest and swallow her up; to rescue her, as they had in Somalia…

 _They had long, long forsaken her when the world began to explode somewhere far away from her and yet close all around. The door of her cell banged open wide, but she lacked the hope to lift her head, to scheme or defend. Who would be coming for her at the end of everything?_

" _Ziva! Ziva, god. It's me. It's Tony, hey—"_

 _From his experimental touch, she flinched, a reflex of fear. Tony? Somehow, she knew he didn't belong there with all her hurt, but with a voice of rust, her inquires rasped inaudible, and he was drowning her—_

" _It's okay now, you hear me? But we gotta go, right now. Ziva?"_

 _Her eyes stung, watching furious slices of his knife make slivers of the ropes at her ankles and wrists—binds that'd held her body in place while her soul shriveled. Freedom, a cool blade._

" _Ziv?"_

 _Again, his arms reached for her and again she flinched…and then fell forward into them, exhausted. And as he carried her lifeless ruins through harsh winds and the chink-chink-chink-chink-chink of guns under a jet-black jealous sky, she wondered so many impossibilities but mustered volume for only one, buried into his shoulder—_

" _H-how did you find me?"_

" _Your sister found you," he replied, and swept her out the desert._


	3. Part III

_Warning: More adult themes. Read carefully._

* * *

 **Part III**

 _Tali David bore a remarkable resemblance to her older sister, down to that damn widow's peak. The foreign, dark-haired beauty walked out of the photographs Ziva had shown him over the years—Tali on stage, in costume, mouth suspended in song—and into the bullpen on a sunny day in late-July._

" _Mossad may be like the Mafia," Gibbs had said to him once. "One big happy family."_

 _Tony was certain that wasn't the case here. But he_ was _confused. And he wasn't the only one._

" _What brings you all the way to America, Ms…Da-veed?"_

" _Ziva has mentioned me." A rueful smile. "She spoke of you, as well, Agent Gibbs. She said you have honor."_

 _Her voice was honey and accented lyric, a melody in its clear tone even just speaking, and Tony remembered being nineteen in college and falling a little bit in love with a girl after he heard her sing "On My Own" in a student production of Les Misérables._

" _Ziva did tell you she's back with Mossad now, right?" McGee, thawing of his shock faster than Tony. "She's not here, if you're—"_

" _I know. She was sent on a mission soon after she returned to us. Now she is in danger."_

" _How do you know that?"_

 _Tali did not struggle to hold the sharp gaze of the legendary Leroy Jethro Gibbs. Had she practiced the trick on her father? "I had a vision of her suffering greatly. I know she needs help."_

 _Gibbs scoffed. "Glad they sent me the sane sister."_

" _If you do not do anything, you will be no better than our Abba! He did not believe me, either, and if he knew I was here and not in New York City with the rest of my opera company…" Her head shook, dispelling the consequences from her mind. She raised a resolved gaze. "I risked coming here because I thought you would be different than him. You were mishpocha to Ziva. Family."_

 _What it must have cost her, Tony thought, to admit strangers were closer to Ziva than her actual blood. Except for Tali herself, who held her ground—a few steps away from her sister's old desk, a void of metal and loose ends._

 _After a skeptical sigh, Gibbs asked, "What evidence do you have besides a 'vision'?"_

" _Half of her team has since returned to Tel Aviv—without her. And…" With steady hands, Tali retrieved a tiny thumb drive from her shoulder bag. "You will find all the details of her mission here. I took it from the office of the Director of Mossad."_

 _Brows at three corners of the bullpen raised in curious tandem._

" _Ziva never told us you were in the, uh, family business, too." McGee accepted the gadget from her._

" _I am not," she sniffed, crossing thin, thin arms. "But Abba only decided that when I was ten."_

" _He'd blindfold you." The blockage in his throat—a dislodged, wandering heart, maybe—released, and Tony babbled from memory; all he had of her now was what she'd given him. "You and Ziva and Ari. Then he'd take you out into the woods. Leave you there to find your way out."_

 _The others all but forgotten, Tali stalked him, the wounded gazelle in the pack. The easy prey. Like her sister, she ignored personal space boundaries. Was it an Israeli thing? Her hand rested heavy atop the sleeve of his creased suit jacket, the arm underneath recently out of its sling; the arm that'd been dislodged with everything else in his life two months earlier._

" _She shared with you," the young woman deduced, golden eyes shrewd._

" _We were partners."_

" _Will you help me find her?"_

 _Were, he wanted to emphasize, along with cement, her gun at his chest, furious accusations and belated confessions, jealousy…yes, that, too. Tarmac. One short?_

 _What she wanted, DiNozzo._

 _Tony swallowed down the past—the true obstruction holding him back—and nodded._

 _Her smile wasn't Ziva's, but it hit him the same way; he'd do anything to see it again. And then she intoned to him alone: "Toda."_

 _Raindrops plopped onto his head from the hotel overhang, running down his temples, circling the lids of his eyes. He had only what she'd given him, and only one response…_

"Prego. A nice block of parmesan. We'll make it an _Italiano_ feast." Cell phone pinched between shoulder and ear, Tony threaded a leather belt through the pant loops he couldn't see. "I'll swing by the store after work. Pick up everything. How's that sound?"

"Tali likes pasta," Ziva concurred from across the city.

"How is she?"

"Sleeping, now. It is just Natana and I. We've been up most of the night, haven't we, _Tanaleh_?"

Around the distinct ache in his chest, Tony could function; it was such a frequent aliment. He scanned the bureau. "Babe, you know where my cuff links—"

"Downstairs on the counter. You left them there last night."

"Oh, right." He stopped dressing, took the phone in his hand. Listened to her breathing. They could be silent with each other; a summer apart taught them how. "Want me there? I've got comp time—"

"Go to work, _dovh_."

"Hey, I'll have you know I shaved this morning." Tony chuckled, and the ache inside him subsided, almost completely, when he imagined her smiling.

/ / ~ / / ~ / /

Ziva ended the call and Natana squawked from within her arms. The little bird was hungry, still.

Their _Savta_ from long ago ringing in her ears: _Doesn't your Ima ever feed you girls?_

Natana had taken slowly, and with difficulty, to Tali's breast. Latch, unlatch went her preemie mouth. And she was an impatient baby, adding to her inexperienced mother's frustration; fussing with eyelids screwed shut, she rooted to the anonymous supple mound pressed against her cheek.

"I have nothing for you, _motek_. I am not her." Ziva nudged the knuckle of her forefinger between searching lips, massaging the teeth-less gums. "Let us get you a refill, hm?"

Enfamil mixed with water, warmed up in the microwave. Natana choked on big gulps, but never ceased sucking at the rubber nipple, ravenous. Her aunt paced the apartment during the feeding; they checked on Tali, who twitched in her sleep just as their _Ima_ had always become stormy and electric when felled with migraines.

 _Watch your sister while I lie down, Ziva._

 _It is just Natana and I._

A coughing gurgle. The infant sucked at air, bottle empty. Pat, pat, rub, pat, pat, rub. A smattering of spit-up onto the rag over her shoulder, a hefty belch, and finally Natana was satisfied, belly full and ready to doze.

Cradling the bundle—downy chocolate wisps over her smoothed forehead; knees curled up to her stomach, a natural fit from months spent scrunched in-womb—Ziva paced more, a swaying tread. Snippets from beyond the walls filtered: neighbors beginning their day, departing with hurried steps for offices and shops and universities. She would miss class that afternoon. Next week began finals, her first full year of college nearly over, as was Tali's maternity leave from the Washington National Ope—

 _Oh._

A familiar sun dawned at the center of her chest, rays in sudden rise and stretch over torso, back, and neck, flares rushing up from under, as if she was catching fire—and the ignition was an internal spark. There was never any warning.

Ziva glided into the living room, taking care not to wake Natana as she eased her into the playpen gifted by Tony and herself. Into the kitchen, the freezer for an ice pack she then wrapped in a dish towel and placed atop her breastbone, over the glinting gold Star of David—a successor for the original gone missing in the sands of Africa.

It was the only thing she'd lost there that could be replaced.

The ice pulled double-duty: Tali was stronger than she looked and a bruise had bubbled up beneath Ziva's left collarbone, pink and puffy and tender.

Down, down, down the fever slipped. _My lobster_ , Tony was fond of teasing her until the heat receded below the horizon. She rested against the counter, chilled cloth roughing her skin; she breathed through the sizzle.

The doctors told her it was normal for any woman experiencing menopause, even if the change had been forced prematurely upon her body; even if it hadn't yet been a full year since—since the rescue…

 _She knew something was wrong before they boarded the military freight out of Somalia. A woman knows her body._

 _Her voice was unused; it was easier to stay silent, absorb the torture as she'd done for months, and allow Tony to fill up everything with talk of Tali, who awaited their return in D.C. It was the only safe ground for them to walk on, a bridge back from where they'd last parted on a battlefield of mistrust: their partnership, the greatest casualty._

 _She ignored the twinge below her belly button, the stabs at her low back. Ignored, ignored—going so far as to press herself into his side, too blinded with shunning the mounting pain to notice his tentative grip in return. How she might have appeared—filthy, a delicate layer of dried, brown blood on her skin, hollow—didn't occur to her, either._

 _It soon became too much. Her first and only cry was solitary ache, a howl of mourning. His grip tightened then, as if he could stop her from falling apart; but the blows had long since been dealt—fine lines of fracture adorned her body under stiff, grimy clothes, hairline cracks in a clay pot. She was already in pieces._

 _Everything sped up._

" _Lie her down."_

" _Ziva? Can you hear us?"_

" _Blood."_

 _Her eyes roamed the intricate metal of the plane; beneath her was what felt like couch cushions, though that didn't make sense. She gave up trying to figure it out, or anything; her thoughts were thick, fuzzy. Shadows of the men she once considered family moved at the edges of her blurring vision. It was cold, and there was wetness at her opening, down her inner thighs. She wanted to ask for one of their jackets, for warmth and modesty, but mulish words denied her._

 _It was too late. They had seen everything. Everything she had become._

 _Gibbs, from somewhere: "McGee, radio the pilot, we need to make a—"_

" _Hey." All-American scruff and sweat angled over her, overwhelming the pinprick of awareness not stolen by agony. He took her hands in his, careful of the tips where nails were just beginning to grow in, wavy and brittle, over the mottled beds. "We're going get you help, okay? You'll be just fine soon."_

 _This man she had known and his eyes could not keep truths from her. She trusted the sheen glassing hazel more than his promises, more than her own pain receptors; she translated his faraway gaze with better accuracy than the language her own body screamed, screamed—_

 _Ziva arched, contorting violently with a pang shooting through her tailbone, and he intoned things she would never remember until it abated, and she lay down again, her breaths labored and uneven._

 _His face had fallen, shedding its comforting lie, and she burned with his pity. Her mouth worked, tapping hidden springs, wetting._

" _Fff-fought them," she forced through rust and wheeze._

" _That's my ninja," Tony praised with no victory, no light in his wounded smile. He might even have been crying for her, which seized her straining heart in a funny way, but there was a tug, tugging—_

 _I fought them, she thought while surrendering to the pull—to the blackness._

 _And I lost._

/ / ~ / / ~ / /

 _Time after that alternated pain and numbness so often that peace had no resting place, like a dove flapping over flames, always in flight. She dwelled in a pool of fire, the waves searing and cooling her all at once. It seemed ages, and simultaneously no time at all, for her to surface out of the dark._

 _Above, the world was white, heavenly if for the sterile odor permeating. It pinched at her, or was that the needles? Bruised, heavy lids cracked, released dammed trickles into her hairline, behind her ears; and still she expected her dank cell, her chair, walls of blood-stained stone. The cleanliness and lack of omniscient fear was alien._

 _And they told her things._

 _The stream of information required a sieve from the doctors' mouths to her water-logged mind. But a woman knows her body. Some things, they didn't have to tell her but did anyway._

 _You suffered a miscarriage, Ms. David._

 _Oh._

 _Suffered—she rolled it around her scabbed tongue. What else?_

 _There was a list out of her sight from which they read: infection…removal. They said it was necessary. They said it would have spread otherwise. They said she wouldn't be able to conceive naturally, but her womb had been spared. She would make a full recovery. Do you have any questions?_

 _Like the demons in the desert, the doctors fled from spewing glimmers of the war they ignited inside of her; fled from the sobs that wracked her body and split stitches open. Through hours and hours she keened, she wept—not for herself, but for the seed of violence killed by her silence, for the lives she could not bear into the world. She wept for what would never be._

 _And when there was nothing of her left to offer in penitence, her mutism, her saving grace and protector in the wild, the archangel Raphael, gathered her close. In his arms, she found her quiet sorrow; she did not wish for his healing or miracles, only his protection in her grief._

 _That night, Tali came out of the mist, mournful in song. Her achot, her true protector, could not help her now. She thought of the promises made on a sea-scented night, promises that stood tall and prophetic amidst the wreckage. No, nothing would ever be the same._

 _That night, there were doors and demons waiting beneath waves of oblivion._

 _That night was the first she dreamed of the fence._

/ / ~ / / ~ / /

Natana was a light sleeper, waking just a half-hour after dozing off in her aunt's arms. Her cries echoed through the apartment, a bleating siren.

Long recuperated from the hot flash, Ziva set aside the novel from her overnight bag and was instantly at the baby's disposal. Her knees bounced, sliding into a natural rhythm of soothe—a portion of her womanhood missed by the surgeon's blade, its edge dulled from rendering a twenty-nine-year-old, childless and not yet married, infertile.

To her nose she lifted the infant, inhaling along the crinkled, sticky neck: an aroma of formula, baby power, something tangy. Salt of tears lingering, perhaps.

"Come along, _Tanaleh_ ," she bade to the squirming life in her embrace. "A diaper change, yes? And then we will wake your _Ima_ , too."


	4. Part IV

_Note: Hi all! I want to thank those who've let me know they're reading. This story must be coming as a shock after "Salam," but I've grown so much as a writer even in the short time since my baby ended. That there are folks willing to grow with me, still trusting me to tell them a story, means a lot. Thank you. ~T : )_

* * *

 **Part IV**

From inside her tomb, Tali listened.

The hushed footsteps of her sister retreating down the hall from a second attempt to raise the dead. The slow inhale-exhale of the apartment, the walls and floors settling further into the foundation. The tweet of a bird—a jay?—beyond the folded blinds, the sealed window. She listened, and she heard the absence of her baby.

 _She stops crying for you._

Her breasts ached, swollen and firm; she needed to pump. Natana could rarely latch and give her a natural release. She would dry up, eventually, if she did not nurse or pump. Then what would she have to offer her child?

Onto her side Tali rolled, curling around the pouch of her deflated womb; angular limbs coiled in the likeness of a snail's shell. The new position introduced her to cool patches of the sheet and she shied, yanking on the puffy comforter, tucking it to her ears. Her feet were sock-less, numb toes scrunching.

 _Just a few more minutes, please, Ziva, please._

There was a time when she was the most impatient of beings, a restless thing. Her siblings had known duty, order, but she was untamed, blurring the scenery, her attachments deep and cascading, or frigid; she sank into roles, living them through and with abandon. Audiences marveled: so young, so fearless.

If she stood still too long, a dark cloud gathered and she turned inside out, a negative copy of herself. She became inhuman, blood and muscle and sinew bared. It was while she was waiting that everything changed…

" _Talia?"_

 _Her childhood nickname out of the mouth of a childhood friend. It was to her surprise that Noam Herschel peered around the door of her dressing room after a weeknight performance; it was more of a surprise, pleasantly so, to see that he had grown up handsomely boyish._

 _Kind, too, she found through their reacquaintance, the theatre beyond emptying and darkening around them and their grazing knees. Since their lives diverged after formative school, the world had enriched him, rather than torn him down, and she lapped in the pool of his goodness, his ease of being._

 _It had been so long since she was unburdened._

 _The first vision came on an early-summer's night, her Ima's ghostly hand at her cheek, focusing her gaze on the nightmare of her sister's suffering, a silent tragedy in shadows and sensation Tali felt all along her own skeleton in the morning; her fingertips stung and there was a throbbing at her low back, as if she had been sitting in nothing but a hard chair for days, weeks._

 _Ever since, there was waiting—for opportunity and means, for someone to believe her; waiting to answer the call of her dreams, the same vision prophesying torment baiting her restive bones night after night after—_

 _Ziva was slipping, and her little sister felt caged, hands bound, powerless to tow her back to shore. What if she was too late?_

 _Tali felt, above all else, alone._

 _And Noam was a fountain of compliments and confessions of long-tempered adoration, possessing the softest coffee-brown eyes that she didn't ask him to avert when stripping out of her ornate costume. There was not a second thought in her brain or body about kissing him while clothed only in her creamy slip—or of taking him back to her tiny apartment in the city and guiding him inside of her, exposing every edge, every trembling doubt for him to soothe, fill, unravel with the feather-light bliss of a familiar stranger's touch._

 _With the bedroom windows flung open, balmy midnight air blew in, sealing the sweat on their joined, rhythmic bodies, binding._

" _My sweet Talia," Noam whispered, mouth hot between her tiny breasts, his strong arms tunneling under her back and forming a cradle, lifting, lifting, lifting…_

…her through layers of gauzy reverie, lifting her to sitting on the mattress, the covers falling pleated in her lap. The wall of her American bedroom, the crib in the corner swam and banked in her blurred sight; her stomach curdled at the shock.

"It is time to get up, Tali."

At the bedside was Ziva, framed in a shaft of intruding light from the hallway; perhaps satisfied Tali would stay upright without their aid, her hands released.

"Natana is hungry," she said in their _Ima_ 's voice, a blend of nurture and authority. "Come, do not keep her waiting any longer."

Tali pushed her shoulders up, dimpled chin bobbing—comply and reaction, both; the memory of his hands alighting shivers of pleasure on her skin would linger always, for even after Noam dozed off beside her cooling, sticky body; even after he departed through a sun-filled doorway the next morning, she was no longer alone.

/ / ~ / / ~ / /

"Look who is up, Natana."

Not that the infant would have recognized its mother. Ziva barely discerned her sister from the waif shuffling out of the bedroom, a prisoner emerging through concentration camp gates, wincing at the noon rays sifting through the parted blinds over the windows, unsure of the warmth, the brightness. The reality of freedom.

Their ancestors. Their suffering. So _much_ suffering.

More than her siblings, Tali looked like them, the beautiful ones put on cattle cars: her inky hair, the ethnicity in her sharp features, her bony frame. She belonged in history books, in black and white photographs. In memory.

In her own modern apartment, she was displaced, a refugee on the fray of living. Bare toes hedged white linoleum.

Ziva flipped the knob on the stove, extinguishing the flame. "Sit."

As if she'd needed the permission, Tali staggered forward with sheltered movements, the way a soldier held themselves when wounded. She collapsed into the closest chair at the dinette, still in her peach nightgown. Still without words.

Silence was a defense Ziva knew well.

Ladle, ladle the _kashki_ emptied from the pot into a low bowl. The consistency was thin, soupy, but she worried the grainy porridge would lack the flavor of home—and more, the ability to heal as it had all the illnesses they contracted as girls. A pad of butter and a rounded tablespoon of brown sugar were apology as much as garnish.

"I tried to make _Savta_ 's recipe." The bowl met the table with a dull _clunk_. "I did not remember it well, though. You may not—"

"Is that…" Her voice revived like a smoothed stone out of a river; it was a child's pure tone. Tali pointed at her sister's chest, squinting.

Ziva glanced down at the baby swaddled to her breast, the soft, navy wrap another present from her and Tony. Natana gurgled from within the crisscross folds, newborn-blue eyes alert. Smiling gently, the aunt bent her knees, affording the mother a better view of her child. Facilitating reunion.

But Tali's faraway gaze floated over Natana to the splotchy bruise beneath her sister's collarbone; she tested the damage with a cold finger. "I did that to you."

Knees straightened, a hopeful heart fell. Ziva wrapped her arms around the bundle, shielding her niece from a rejection she could not yet understand.

"Eat. We will talk once you are finished."

Spoon in hand, Tali stared at the food, stuck. Perhaps this was the product of the karmic residue built up when their roles were reversed, when Ziva had just returned to D.C…

" _You should eat." Tali sat side-saddle at the foot of the hospital bed, raising the plastic lids off plates of breakfast food on the tray. "Are you even awake under there, Zivvie?"_

 _A pinch to her bare foot, a rousing method from their childhood._

 _Ziva jerked, recoiling legs up out of reach and view beneath the scratchy blankets; to her, the teasing touch had carried an electric current. A tired growl rippled past her lips._

" _You will eat later, then. Would you like to take a shower? I can help—"_

" _You have done enough." The intonation was as vague as the connotation. Ziva rolled onto her side, delving further under the bedding, further away from daylight, from life itself—but mostly, from her sister's crumpled face._

" _It is no trouble," Tali insisted, a wound opening in her voice. "I am already here."_

 _And the once brazen Mossad officer countered with cracks and wrinkles: "I did not ask you to come."_

 _Not to D.C. Not to her aid. She never wanted any of this. She never meant to be captured, alive._

 _Weight shifted off the end of the mattress, and then Tali was kneeling at her bedside, rings of tears and a half-moon smile her offerings, as precious as gold, frankincense, and myrrh. "You did not have to, dearest achot."_

 _The lioness peered out of her cave, unblinking. "How could you trust a…vision, Tali?"_

" _Because it showed me that my sister was suffering. And you were."_

 _They hadn't discussed the miscarriage; did they sit Shiva for such a death? It had been over seven days already. They hadn't discussed the dark red bands around her wrists and ankles, or how any of the dappled purple-and-black bruises, some in the chilling imprints of male hands, on her neck, stomach, and thighs came to be; but the shadows of pain pervaded everything, musty and laden, suffocating._

 _Awkwardness settled between sisters, dust in an abandoned room._

 _Tali snaked her hand through the guardrail, straightening the blankets. "You never believed Ima about them, either, but now you must—"_

" _No."_

" _No?"_

 _A buzzing nipped at Ziva's throat, threatening to close the pipe ahead of the truth, but she had been silent for long enough. She forced herself honest before her little sister and implored, "How can I, when there was no foretelling of Ima dying alone on a city street? Or of Ari's betrayal to us all? If what Ima told us was true—if the spirits do speak to us—then why was I not…" Her bandaged fingers gestured wildly, to the cramped hospital room, to the death clinging to her skin, to the desert of fear. "Warned?"_

 _And Tali—dear, untainted Tali—gave no reply but for hopeless eyes: the expression of a girl who lost her most cherished toy, only to have it returned to her broken beyond repair._

/ / ~ / / ~ / /

"We waited too long."

Ziva stepped back, arms afloat and already chilling in the seconds without 8½ lbs. of life warming their embrace. Natana was none the wiser for the transfer from one dark-haired David woman to another. Going softly into her mother's arms, the baby girl stirred, new muscles and joints _sssstretching_ and then falling still. Content.

"Her sleep schedule is ruined," Ziva observed, nestling the spit-up rag onto her sister's shoulder, at the ready. "She will wake hungrier than before."

Muted mid-day sun illuminated the open floor plan; the fridge clicked on from the kitchen, groaning. An upstairs neighbor played again and again a recording of a Chopin Nocturne—Op.9 No.2, Ziva recalled—the same piece her piano teacher would plink out in the final minutes of their weekly lessons, evoking the student's awe each time.

From the rocking recliner beside the window, Tali released a trembling puff of nerves as instinct nudged thin forearms into a bassinet beneath the diaper-cushioned tush and wobbly neck. Moments' earlier pleas— _I do not know if I should, yet, or if I can_ —wafted close-by, twirling with the dust motes.

And as excuses climbed the ladder of Ziva's throat—return the wrap to the hall closet, pack away the leftover _kashki_ , clean the lunch dishes—their square of earth gave way, knocking loose insecurities corkscrewed in Tali's shoulders, shaking them out at her feet with metrical quakes; sudden, grasping breathes engulfed the waterfall trills of a dying Nocturne.

"Shh, you will wake—"

"I cannot do this…"

"Do what?"

"I-I do not know _how_ to be her mother," Tali blurted loud, panic like a temperature rising, rising, and then a peak: "It should be you."

Jochebed at the Nile, releasing the basket.

A flutter of horror substituted Ziva's next breath, an exhale—"Do not say such a thing. You are just struggling now, but it—"

"No, it is true! I only had her because I thought I was losing you," Tali purged, glancing down at the baby, small and dependent in her arms; Ziva doubled the gaze on the sleeping form so blissfully unaware of its role in this warped version of Solomon's judgment.

If a mother cannot care for her child…who will?

Ziva tasted metallic on her tongue. "It is not right."

"But it is good!" Desperation, its claws in deep. "You have Tony. I see how he is with her, Ziva. You must see it, too!"

The former assassin, agent, woman swallowed. What was she now, without what she lost? "He loves Natana," she allowed, "but that does not mean he thinks of her as his own."

"He could, and so could you!"

" _Enough_."

To a knee and the floor, Ziva sank in front of the chair and her unraveling sister, recognizing Hell in the image. Labels of pain: post-traumatic stress, post-partum depression, but it did not seem like they were _past_ anything after the night they'd had. Their personalized cells of torment sat side-by-side, doors open ajar, old and new fears alike overstaying their welcome.

How had it come this far? How had it come to torture, and blood, and premonitions their mother swore were hereditary, theirs to wield, to reap? In the end, nothing prepared them; they had only each other and empty rooms and darkness…

… _beneath the swaths of fabric covering their sight, the woods around them a cold and quiet maze._

" _I am scared," the little girl sobbed into the hours of wandering unfurled behind them._

 _The elder girl lifted a corner of her blindfold, using the forbidden peek to seize her sister's hand. "Do not worry, achot. I know the way out…."_

Hands went to knobby knees at the nightgown's crimped hem. Skin on skin. "Tali," she demanded, seeking up from below. "Tali, look at me."

Golden orbs snapped straight, wide, watery; it was impossible to mistake fear in their cores. A variation on a plea: "She should be yours."

It didn't matter that this time something broke free in Ziva's chest, internal shrapnel drifting, or that thoughts were spared to wonder— _would she miss that piece of herself? would it ever find its way back?_ Her heart launched into no sprint; she was through questioning her lot.

"No," she maintained, cradling her baby sister's wet face between her hands, thumbs imparting comforting strokes. "No. Everything is as it should be."

Teardrop-clumped lashes batted frantic Morse code, spelling out disbelief. "Y-you have…seen it?"

Ziva's sight smeared like finger paint on a canvas, a wire fence materializing in the swirling colors. "I did not have to."

Rousing cries interrupting; Natana unfolded from sleep, mouth a blooming rosebud, searching. As did a sniffling Tali.

"Where is her bottle?"

Ziva tugged a strap of her sister's nightgown off her bony shoulder. "All she needs is you."

But by their side she stayed, witnessing two hearts opening and breaking and struggling and loving; witnessing the most intimate of connections, more so than the act forced upon her in the desert, the same one that brought Natana into their world. Life was easier created, easier lost, than nurtured.

Latch, unlatch—latch.

The infant's eager sucking filled the air, mingling with Tali's breathless relief, her teary joy. "She is—"

"Yes," Ziva sighed, and went willingly when Tali took her hand and placed it on the tender stretch of Natana's back, joining them all as one, just as she'd done…

… _to her flat, unsuspecting stomach, a revelation in show, not tell._

 _For the first time in her hospital stay, Ziva felt a surge of latent self infuse her veins, flushing out the dredges of her wrecked soul. "You are…? H-how did this…?"_

 _A roll of Tali's eyes dismissed the questions as rhetorical. "Some things we do not see coming."_

 _Tattered remnants of Ziva's doubt—Why was I not…warned?—circled in the stale air conditioning, unresolved._

 _Tali reclaimed her hands, but even untethered, Ziva clung to the budding life, the faint heartbeat that, briefly, echoed from inside her own womb; this life, carrying on the percussion of hope, thriving._

 _The tight skin of her face cracked, lips slivering wide—another first in so long. "May I ask whose it is?"_

 _Tali smiled too, a girl with a cure for her broken possession, and intoned, "She is ours."_


	5. Part V

**Part V**

Submerged, red and ruddy. Wrinkling. Calloused in the tell-tale spots: pad of thumb, webbing, trigger finger. All other evidence of his work, once theirs, left out in the car. Badge, tie, gun.

Ziva rolled his cuffs, revealing riverbeds of forearms not yet tanned by summer's rays. He promised they would get away—a week somewhere extravagant. _We've been through so much this year_ , but his eyes worried only of her.

"I'll hold," Tony divvied, shutting off the jet of water, "you wash."

And together, they bathed the baby in the kitchen sink; in the shower, her mother washed off identical residue from the previous night's tears and agony.

 _Where does it hurt, motek?_

Natana batted tacky lids and shivered; a tiny fist slipped into Johnson & Johnson froth.

 _Here?_ Ziva dragged the washcloth over the infant's chest, the creases under her pointy chin, between sweet, miniscule fingers and toes. _Here?_ _Here? Here?_

"Ziv." His shoulder nudged her back to him. "You're going to rub her raw."

 _No_ , she thought. _I am making her new._

For that was how she later found Tali in the bedroom, shrouded in terrycloth robe and pink from steam, underbrush of decay sloughed away, ashes spiraling down the drain. Her sister, reborn. And toiling over a tangle in her damp strands.

"She is with Tony?"

"Yes," Ziva assured, omitting the ease with which he'd collected the baby—diapered and swaddled—and nestled them into the recliner by the window; inside the basket of his arms, Natana had been as serene as the pale swans paddling across the periwinkle pond of her sleeper onesie.

 _I see how he is with her…you must see it, too._

"Let me."

Fidgeting fingers took over massaging oils through the thick mane, and Tali relaxed, out-of-work hands falling to her lap, shoulders collapsing. Even as a young child, her patience was never greater than when having her hair done.

" _Zivvie?_ " She reached up, tapped her wrist. "How did you know…last night—"

A warm chuckle. "You think I could not hear _Tanaleh's_ cries from across the city, hm?"

Tali hummed, neither accepting nor challenging. "And you will st—"

"Yes," Ziva assured, again, beginning to part, tug, weave.

Child-like wonder exclaimed, "You have not put my hair in a French braid in…"

"… _forever. What is going on?"_

 _Tali tied off the weave running down her sister's protruding spine. "It is a special day, yes? I thought you would like to look nice when we go home."_

" _We have no home." Mossad was corrupt; their Abba, the puppet-master. Israel was their homeland, but no longer their home, and neither was the temporary apartment they were transferring to from the hospital. "What are you not telling me?"_

 _The veil of secrecy lowered with a teenaged huff. "Do not be mad, but he has been here every day! Only you were never in a good mood, and—"_

"Who _has been here every day?"_

" _Tony, of course."_

" _No." Ziva blinked against waning summer's glare through the fourth-story window. The desert had been time out of life, and she was only beginning to keep track again. Nine days in one hospital or another; Gibbs had been her only visitor—to take her official statement of Somalia. Tony had no business at her bedside._

 _Tali swayed like a sixth-grader with a crush. "I think he loves you."_

" _You are hormonal," Ziva scoffed._

" _I was not the only one who believed my vision. He believed in_ you _, Zivvie. He saved you."_

 _She gulped breath for retort, but out tumbled the slice of his knife at her binds, his arms holding her together, his eyes maybe expelling tears over her crumbling remains on the plane out of Africa. He'd looked upon her wreckage, seen the blood, the outcome of demon urges and wild winds, of being too late._

 _Some things could not be saved._

 _But he arrived at her hospital room wearing jeans, a shirt that brought out the sea-green in his eyes, and a steady gaze that did not dip below her chin—to the yellowing bruises on her neck, the angry bite marks on her breastbone, the missing pieces beneath her skin. It was his way not to dwell on the worst of the world, at least not outwardly—a character trait they shared and that she appreciated from him as never before._

 _He could sit with her, the weight of recent history present and accounted for, and yet reach for her bandaged fingers and attempt to make her laugh until she was almost convinced nothing had changed; until they were delivered not out of the desert or their fight of prelude or back to their former selves, but above it all, surmounting what could not be undone for a mountaintop precipice, their future infused with fresh, pine air._

 _Apologies would come later, whispered over scars and a sore shoulder. Now there was hope._

" _So," Tony said, squeezing her hand, numbering her knuckles with a rough thumb. "I hear you're busting out of here. Want a ride?"_

/ / ~ / / ~ / /

Tali took her baby back from Tony, and Ziva took the place of her niece on his lap.

"You're almost as light as Nat," he complained as she curled into him, torso twisting nearly flat with his solid chest. The arms that'd held Natana enfolded her, a shield at her back, a sword along her hip. He kissed her temple once, twice, and settled, rocking them gently.

Motherhood, a familiar hymn to be sung, soon rang clear from Tali's lungs, filtering out to them from behind the closed bedroom door. Perhaps if Ziva had possessed the haunting tones of her sister or Persephone, she might have pleased the monsters of the Underworld, been spared their wrath and the interminable fallout.

Perhaps.

She tilted her head, ran her nose up the stubble of his throat, inhaled: musk and baby shampoo. Exhaled: "I am staying here."

The chair and his breathing stopped.

"Tali is… struggling greatly," she elaborated into the stillness. "It was this or she would have had us…take Natana."

"What?"

"I could not believe it, either, but she is doubtful of her abilities to mother and convinced herself we would better care for the baby."

"So why did you say _no_?" He nudged her and she sat back; the confusion in his features confused her.

"Natana is not ours, Tony."

"I know that. It's just if your sister is that in over her head, maybe it _would_ be better for Nat if we took her for awh—"

"She is not ours," Ziva repeated hoarsely, raw, tightening the noose on the discussion and laying down again, ear to the _thump-thump-thumping_ organ in his chest. "Tali will learn. I will help her, for as long as she needs me."

He'd suggested the very idea not a full day earlier, yet now it was a fight?

Tony sighed out the excess ammo she felt buzzing through his body and restarted the soothing motion like a pulse. In time with the sway, his warm, deliberate hand slid under her shirt to the taut skin of her stomach; then lower, to denim's lip and her womb, kneading dough that would never rise.

"Since we're on the topic…. Do you ever think about _ours_?"

Ziva shut purple-fatigued eyelids, bracing as she had on the night the door to her cell was left ajar, but the invading quiver burst through her defenses, swelling to the size of an orange from the groves behind her childhood home in her throat, thinning her voice to a rasp that demanded—"Why would you ask me that?"

"I only meant th—"

"You know I cannot, Tony. You _know_." She shoved his forever-loose shoulder, launching to her feet; she could never hurt him as much _they'd_ hurt her.

A hiss, a delay, but he was not detoured, vaulting after her. "You can hit me and walk away all you want. I'm only—"

"I am getting ice!"

She was an oven of smoldering coal, a fire kindled and never extinguished. She was vacuous, echoing. She was nightmares of rape and blind-anxiety when her loving boyfriend touched her for pleasure and on her back, bleeding out the dying notes of a heartbeat between her legs in front of men she thought of as a father, a brother, a regret. She was the lies the doctors told her, guaranteeing life not half-demon but all _theirstheirstheirs—_

The compress, laid flat over her breastbone, was bringing down the hormonal fever as Tony turned the corner into the kitchen, propping against the wall.

"There are other options, that's all I meant. IVF—"

"Please, stop."

"—adoption, or—"

"Why did you believe Tali's vision about me," she roared, all excess fire channeling, "but refuse to believe mine about _this_?"

A wince struck his handsome face, as if stung with venom. It wouldn't have mattered if his lips were swollen shut; the question was rhetorical: Tali walked into NCIS and cast a line of hope; Ziva's recurring vision afforded nothing but a fence…

… _a division of yours and mine, a confirmation of exile. Sometimes she recognized the pasture, the wheat fields on either side. She walked there with her mother and sister on cooling Israeli evenings, but never did they encounter what she alone found at the end of every sprint along the waist-high wires._

 _The baby might have been mistaken for a rodent or small wild animal trapped in the coils if not for its cries, distinctly human and helpless. Yet it did not struggle, lest the barbs sink further through its ragged clothes and into the skin already pocked at the scalp, chubby thighs, and back, blood oozing in rivulets, tainting the tan skin rose; it did not struggle—until Ziva reached into the metal vines, ignoring the cuts and slashes accumulating on her bare arms, and extricated it from the snarl of torture._

 _Then, it fought._

 _The child thrashed against Ziva's comfort as if she was its abuser. The scores of gory pinpricks widened, gushing. Nothing bought it peace until a woman in similar rags appeared on the other side of the fence. There was something magnetic between the two that negated any wondering if they were mother and child._

 _Ziva clutched the baby from hovering out of her embrace. A strange jealousy simmered: she saved it, and for a few seconds, believed it hers. But ownership was the victor, and the pass came and went._

 _She kept only the scars._

/ / ~ / / ~ / /

To Tali's apartment the previous night, the fence had summoned her, its apparition forceful enough to pull her from sleep and bed, to launch her across the city—for ever since Natana arrived before dawn on a crisp early-spring morning, the role of mother and child in Ziva's vision were played by her sister and niece. She took each recurrence as sign, mystical trumping medical; it was a warning she would not ignore this time, a reminder of her lot.

Hold but not keep. Bleed but not heal. Love but lose.

"I do believe you." Tony whispered the synonym for _I'm sorry_ across the distance from him to her.

"I know."

Because they'd met at the mountaintop, history at their backs, and stepped off. She could not help being less female than a six-week-old and more consequence, more gnarled scar tissue; she could not help her need for connection to the earth, to her lineage. "I know," she said again.

"I just want you to be happy because it doesn't seem like you are most of the time so—"

"I am," Ziva swore, unblinking. "With you, and Tali and Natana, I am happy."

And she let him journey, strip the ice from frost-bitten skin, and twine around her in a pattern of forgiveness. Thoughts drifted from wounded, lost babies to them. Calloused thumbs massaging the top of her spine; a body, a mouth, a refuge waiting when she returned from time in a world of language and knowledge, so stark a change from the brutal physical realm in which she was baptized; and it was…unexplainable, how they were, lifelines tangling like hospital IVs; standing in her sister's kitchen, clinging to each other. Reviving.

"Ziv?"

The face she pressed to the side of his neck was dry, and his grip—a weight anchoring their ships to port.

 _I am staying here._

"Just tell me," he begged against the hard line of her collarbone, "in these visions or dreams or whatever the hell they are, that you've never…not once…kept that baby for yourself."

In the restful quiet of the apartment, Ziva thought of her _Ima_ , a majestic raven soaring over stalks of gold wheat, a mother who bore daughters— _achayot_ responsible for each other when everything fell away _—_ though prophecy foretold of a husband wanting sons; she thought of a swirling whirlpool and orders for the desert; a sister's suffering and a fence, yours and mine. And she thought perhaps that was the secret of their womanly gift: not the possession itself, but the power it bestowed.

The power to choose.

/ / ~ / / ~ / /

"So what did you say?"

The stroller bumped, _ga-dunk-ga-dunk_ , over the wooden planks of the boardwalk, _ga-dunk-ga-dunk_.

Before departing the previous night, Tony had pinned her against the kitchen counter and kissed her cheeks and neck, her arms and stomach, leaving marks of promise on her skin like blueprints; lines and points connecting, setting forth designs to never cease cherishing her, keeping her, giving her all of him, the architect of their future.

All she had to do was sign off on the plans.

"I told him that I love him," Ziva replied, swerving to avoid a mother with a toddler melting down. "I am just not ready for…everything, yet."

It took a year to accept her fate; reversing it—altering the outcome of vision and reality—would have a timetable all its own.

"He will wait for you—and one day, you _will_ be ready." Tali's confident endorsement was punctuated by baby lark twittering; under the canopy, Natana kicked and swiped pudgy legs, throwing off the butter-yellow receiving blanket.

"It sounds like someone is enjoying the fresh air." Ziva parked the stroller off to the side of the thoroughfare.

"As I am, _motek_ ," Tali cooed, re-swaddling her daughter and then herself, tightening the folds of the oatmeal sweater around her post-pregnancy frame; honey eyes darted self-consciously to the thin stream of passerby.

An escape from the gloomy apartment was necessary, and there was no debate on the destination, never mind the stretch of beach off the Virginia coast mandated light coats and closed-toe shoes in mid-May. It was their spot.

Ziva watched her little sister—a grown woman, a first-time mother, a survivor in her own right—shut her eyelids on the hazy spring sunshine, chin tipped to the sky, absorbing what warmth she could amidst the tepid breeze beating across her face, tousling loose curls. The first crack in the cocoon.

"We will be okay," Tali voiced out of her trance, resting her head down on her sister's shoulder. "Won't we, Zivvie?" And she linked her arm…

… _through Ziva's, even though the wood of the boardwalk was level and she was "fine," as she told anyone who dared ask after her condition. Tali's elbow hooked about her own afforded support of the moral variety, a pose reminiscent of daily trips down school hallways._

" _Tony took it well."_

" _You do not know him as I do." Ziva glanced behind them at the speck in leather jacket and shades left to recline on the hood of his car for the impromptu pit stop. "He did not like that we would no longer be working together, but I…cannot return to that life—at Mossad or NCIS."_

" _What will you do instead?"_

 _The former officer gazed out at the waves, undulating, renewing themselves over and again. "Perhaps I will attend university, as you and Ari did. I do not know for sure yet." Her eyes rose to the beachfront swarmed with half-naked bodies and judging stares that she swore were magnets to the kaleidoscope of wounds not covered by her borrowed, fall-appropriate clothes, the shadows of trauma in her hollow cheeks… "This was not a good idea."_

" _No." Tali tugged on their union, righting her attempt to flee. "A promise is a promise."_

 _And the ocean, shimmering translucent in the August blaze, almost compared to the white beaches at the foot of her old apartment in Tel Aviv. They reached a quiet spot on the pier, and Ziva clutched to the railing, winded by the short, assisted walk._

" _Are you sure you do not want to go back, Tali?"_

" _After what Abba did to you, my only family is here." She patted her stomach—puffed imperceptibly—and hugged Ziva close._

" _What about the baby's father?"_

 _A fond smile feathered her mouth. "He has a good life, and she will not want for love from us." The soon-to-be-mother was convinced she carried a daughter—no vision required._

" _And what of your career?"_

" _There are opera companies here, too."_

" _But—"_

" _Ziva, enough! This is my choice." Tali clasped her hand, outshining a lighthouse beacon. "Wherever you go, I will stay with you."_

 _Their future surged as unpredictable as the surf below their feet, but for the first time in months, the tumultuous waters within Ziva stilled, comforted; and she closed her fingers, holding fast to her sister through the calm._

 **Epilogue**

It was divined on the night she returned to him.

Tony met her in the foyer and was wicking off her clothes before the door fully shut on the outside world. They came together against the wall, on the couch, and due to a humorous tumble, atop the living room rug, their long-accruing desire laid as bare as their flesh.

 _I missed you_ —words spoken so frequently, she heard their echoes on his tongue, hot and lathing at her inner thighs; she felt them in his calloused fingertips tracing invisible maps, an explorer roaming her landscape anew. _I missed you…_

And she forgot how _this_ had been so complicated since Somalia as their breathing calmed, spent and sweaty bodies curling together in a familiar mold. He remained inside of her, softening; her cheek nestled into her _dohv's_ furry chest ( _I missed you, too)_ ; and as they sailed blissful waters, she spotted _them_ playing on the shore.

Two girls in white dresses with ribbons in their curls; the elder—bossy, with the softest coffee-brown eyes—ruled over the ashen, pebbled dune, while the little one—golden, like wheat—bounded ahead, a fearless lion cub.

 _We will call her Meira, our light._

Near the water's rolling edge they stayed close to one another, attached at hip and linked arm, whispering and giggling as the ringing commenced, pulling her away, away, and she knew it would be Tali calling, awoken by the same vision, shared across city and dreamscape.

For the girls with ribbons in their curls were _theirs_.

And so it was written, a fairy tale at sea, inscribed with a pen of healing and legacy: their daughters—cousins, _bat doda_ —would be sisters.

 _Achayot._

 **The end**


End file.
